Reply To: Community Right to Bid

Hi, We’re a village hall committee who’ve managed to persuade the local council to place a derelict shop which is adjoined to the hall on the community assets register.
After 2 year, we’d like to try for compulsorty puchase. The Land registry provides no address for the owners only information about charges against the property for repairs.
According to what I read about the right to bid, the council is required to contact the owners regarding placement on the register. Their solicitor when adked for the owners address has infomed us that they do not possess this information.
Could anyone tell us Where can we go from here?

Jeff. I’m afraid there simply isn’t a lot of detail on these types of scenarios in the Act itself. The non-statutory guidance to local authorities briefly touches on this issue, as follows:

“A local authority which is not able to give notice to any of these people in the usual way – for instance due to lack of names or addresses – can take reasonable alternative steps to bring the notice to a person’s attention. This could include, for instance, a notice attached to the property.”

So, the local authority ‘can take reasonable alternative steps’, and is encouraged, for instance, to attach a notice to the property in the hope of flushing out information about the owner. I suppose that as well as physical notices they could ‘advertise’ the fact that the asset is under consideration for listing in a host of other ways, on their website or in the local press for instance, if they were minded to do so. But the critical factor would seem to be that a valid nomination should still be given due regard within the 8 week deadline, despite the fact that the owner is apparently unknown at this point.